Actuators can be employed to provide a scanning mechanism in scanners, such as optical scanners, e.g., gene chip scanners and imaging scanners. In such applications, a scanning head, such as an optical scanning head can be coupled to an actuator, such as a voice coil actuator, which moves the scanning head along a translation axis, typically in a cyclical or back and forth motion. This movement can be coupled to movement about another axis, which can be orthogonal to the axis of the first movement, so that the scanning head moves in two dimensions to permit a scan of an area of a sample, e.g., in a raster pattern.
Typically, rapid or cyclical movement in any axis, e.g., cyclic motion in the first axis, can transmit unwanted vibrations to optical or other components in the scanning apparatus, leading to blurring and other scanning distortions. Various methods of reducing vibrations are known, but in relation to optical scanners, many such methods have been impractical, expensive, or insufficiently effective. Thus, vibrations in scanners pose significant technical and economic obstacles to increasing resolution and scanning speed.